Drug Treatment Centers Louisville: Humana Corporation’s Growth in Private Enterprise and Welfare Care
Humana Inc. was founded in 1961 in Louisville, Kentucky by David Jones and Wendell Cherry as a nursing home company. The decision to start the business came in a rather unusual situation. It was whilst both men were playing a game of golf in Louisville. Each of them put up $ 1,000 as their initial investment. The company soon became the largest nursing home company in the United States.
Learning that more profits could be made in running hospitals they divested from the nursing home chain and moved into purchasing hospitals in 1971. To reflect the company’s new direction, the name was changed from Extendicare to Humana Inc. in 1974. Humana experienced tremendous growth organically.in the years that followed. Its takeover of American Medicorp Inc. in 1978 doubled the company’s size. During the mid-1970s, a fast-track construction process enabled the completion and opening of one hospital a month. This accelerated construction schedule compressed time by overlapping processes thus allowing the development of hospital projects incredibly faster. Humana then moved into developing the double corridor model for hospital construction which minimized the distance between patients and nurses by placing nursing support services in the interior of the building with patient rooms surrounding the perimeter.
Humana in time became the world’s largest hospital company in the 1980s. As the American health care system evolved in the 1980s, Humana developed an integrated health care delivery system by creating a family of flexible health care plans, tying up the health care service with a health insurance plan thus enabling them to begin marketing health insurance in 1984. .
Humana brought the pioneering artificial heart research of Dr. Robert Jarvik and Dr. William DeVries to Louisville under the newly-created Humana Heart Institute in 1985. Just in 1982 Clark, a 61-year-old retired dentist from Des Moines, Washington, became the first human to receive a permanently implanted artificial heart at the hands of surgeon William DeVries. For DeVries, then 38, that satisfying moment was the culmination of the three years he had spent perfecting the technique that made the implant possible, and waiting for a patient who met the rigorous criteria established for implant candidates by the Food and Drug Administration. For DeVries the 7½-hr. operation was “almost a spiritual experience. So acquiring such a man together with his collaborator was to bring much invention and life prolongation at the center of Humana.
In the 1990s Humana metamorphosed into a consumer health benefits company. Humana spun-off its hospital operations from the health insurance operations in 1993 and created the new company Galen Health Care Inc. Soon after, Galen merged with Columbia/HCA. After United Healthcare’s failed attempt to acquire Humana in 1998, Humana began pioneering work in consumer driven health care in 1999; launching its first services on September 11, 2001.The marketing and administering of health benefit consumer services. became a very profitable area of Humana’s engagement run principally from its headquarters at the Humana building.
Through a partnership with Navigy, Inc., a subsidiary of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida, Inc., in 2001, Humana launched Availity to empower physicians and other health care professionals with a business solution to conduct their daily health plan transactions.
Humana began marketing health savings account services to individuals and companies in 2003. The Business Health Care Group of Southeast Wisconsin chose Humana as its administrative partner to drive Southeastern Wisconsin health care costs to the Midwest average in 2005, through consumer education largely, providing cost and quality information on health care providers, structuring accountability of all stakeholders and collective purchasing. Today, this Group represents more than 200 member companies, including large and small employers representing more than 150,000 health care consumers in Southeastern Wisconsin.
Upon passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act in the U. S. Congress, Humana launched an aggressive education campaign to market Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug Plans nationwide to Medicare eligible consumers in 2006. Through a cross country RV tour and strategic alliance with medicare distribution concerns such as Wal-Mart, approximately 5 million consumers got signed catapulting Humana to #2 in industry market share for senior products. Humana also launched Right Source, a national mail-order retail pharmacy business in 2006.
The list below shows some of the major acquisitions by Humana since 1990 in the U.S.A::
1990 Michael Reese Health Plan Illinois
1995 The Dental Concern Illinois
1995 Carrington Illinois
1996 Employers Health Insurance (EHI) Wisconsin
1997 Physicians Corp of America (PCA) Texas
1997 ChoiceCare Ohio
2000 Memorial Sisters of Charity Texas
2003 Oschner Health Plan Louisiana
2005 CarePlus Health Florida
2005 Corphealth Behavioral Healthcare Texas
2006 CHA Health Kentucky
2007 Compbenefits Georgia
2007 KMG Minnesota
Over 46 years since its foundation by those two golf players, Humana is now the Official Health Benefits Provider of the PGA Tour and Champions Tour. PGA Tour player David Toms and LPGA player Nancy Scranton are both ambassadors for Humana. With a customer base of over 11.5 million in the United States the company is now the largest Fortune 500 Company. Headquartered in Louisville in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it has generated a market capital of over $ 10 billion and $ 21.4 billion dollars in revenue. Humana employs over 22,500 “associates” nationwide. It markets its health benefit consumer services all over the US and has international business interests in Western Europe. In its March 2007 issue, Fortune Magazine named Humana one of the Top 5 Most Admired Healthcare Companies in the United States.
The picture of Humana making business out of health care and medicine has not been all rosy. There have been widespread opposition to this commercialisation of what they think should be a social service as unethical. This has even often degenerated into legal tussles.
In 1987, Humana sued NBC over a story line in the television medical drama St. Elsewhere where the hospital was to be sold to a for-profit medical corporation and renamed “Ecumena”, with subsequent changes to the hospital, both positive and negative, emanating from that change. Humana forced NBC into showing a disclaimer at the beginning of the September 30 episode saying that the drama had no connection whatsoever with Humana. A news report on that states:
A federal court in Paducah, Ky… ruled that NBC issue a disclaimer before last night’s episode of “St. Elsewhere” explaining that the hospital drama has no relationship with Humana Inc., the for-profit hospital chain noted for its work on the artificial heart.
According to this season’s story line, fictional St. Elsewhere has been sold to a for-profit medical corporation that has renamed the hospital “Ecumena.” The new owners have made improvements to the shabby inner-city Boston hospital, but the corporation is also not as compassionate toward the poor and uninsured as …
On May 30, 1996, Linda Peeno, who was a contract worker for Humana for nine months, testified before Congress as to the demerits of managed care.
She began by making a public confession:
In the spring of 1987, as a physician, I caused the death of a man. Although this was known to many people, I have not been taken before any court of law or called to account for this in any professional or public forum. In fact, just the opposite occurred: I was “rewarded” for this. It bought me an improved reputation in my job, and contributed to my advancement afterwards. Not only did I demonstrate I could indeed do what was expected of me, I exemplified the “good” company doctor: I saved a half million dollars..
I contend that “managed care,” as we currently know it, is inherently unethical in its organization and operation. Furthermore, I maintain that we have an industry which can exist only through flagrant ethical violations against individuals and the public
On the June 21, 2007 episode of Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! radio/television program, Peeno further claimed that “just within a day or so of the refusal of the heart transplant, “I saw a sculpture being installed in the rotunda of Humana’s headquarters and was told … that it had cost about the same as the heart transplant that we had denied… I later found out that that sculpture cost $ 3.8 million, … equivalent to eight heart transplants.”
A video of Linda Peeno’s testimony appeared in Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary Sicko. In a statement about the movie, Humana declared that Peeno was never a Humana associate, but rather a “part-time contractor”. Humana also disputed the portions of Congressional testimony that were shown by saying that because the patient’s specific healthcare plan didn’t cover heart transplants, the denial of coverage was valid.
Humana was also featured in Season One of Moore’s The Awful Truth, shown refusing to give a pancreatic failure sufferer authorization for a transplant due to a contradictory policy that stated that all of this man’s diabetes related expenses were covered by his plan (his pancreas was failing due to his diabetes) but in another section, it said that it wouldn’t cover organ transplants. Moore conducted a fake funeral on the front steps of Humana for the man who was sure to die without the transplant. Three days later, Humana changed their policy and authorized the man’s treatment. This scene was the inspiration for Sicko.
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Arthur Edgar E. Smith was born, grew up and was schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He has taught English since 1977 at Prince of Wales School and, Milton Margai College of Education. He is now a Senior Lecturer at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing English, Literature, as well as Creative Writing for the past seven years.
Mr Smith is widely published with his writings appearing in local newspapers as well as in West Africa Magazine, Index on Censorship, Focus on Library and Information Work amongst others.
He was one of 17 international visitors who participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature sponsored by the U.S.State Department in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.
His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and ‘The Struggle of the Book’
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